


Unexpected Clarity

by womenseemwicked



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Canon Compliant, Coming Out, Established Harringrove, Established Relationship, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Gay Character, Gay Panic, Internalized Homophobia, Lesbian Character, M/M, Nancy is not good at breaking up with boys, Post-Season/Series 03, Pre-Relationship, background Nancy/Jonathan, or whatever i mean we never saw billy's corpse so is he dead or is he sleeping we don't know man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25943545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/womenseemwicked/pseuds/womenseemwicked
Summary: It's the middle of the night and Nancy's having a gay crisis. She calls Steve for advice.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Nancy Wheeler, Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley & Holly Wheeler, Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler, Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler
Comments: 40
Kudos: 276





	1. Unexpected Clarity

“How did you know you were bisexual?”

Nancy’s voice comes through the receiver almost before Steve croaks out a sleepy, “Hello?”

It takes his brain a second to catch up with her.

“I don’t think I’ve rode a bike since 4th grade…” he shakes his head, letting his eyes fall closed against the dryness of arrested sleep.

“No, Steve, _bisexual_. How did you know?” Nancy reiterates. She sounds wired. Like she’s been up for hours studying the subject. For all he knows, she has. He checks his watch. It’s almost 4am. But this is Nance, he knows she wouldn’t wake him up for just nothing, so he hauls himself up into a sitting position against the wall and tries to clear his head.

“Well…” Billy shifts under the sheets beside him and sprawls out a little wider, still dead asleep. Steve’s heart swells in his chest. “I paid attention to what my heart wanted, I guess,” he says, not caring how sappy that sounds. “Not what my parents or society told me I should want, but like… being with a guy… it sounds as good to me as any of that ever did with a girl. Just as natural, y’know?”

Nancy hums but doesn’t say anything further, so Steve turns the question back on her.

“Why’re you asking about this, Nance?” he asks. “You’ve never really seemed that interested or whatever when I’ve talked about it before.”

Nancy huffs a breath in a way so familiar Steve can almost see the way her nose scrunches in his mind’s eye.

“I’m just curious,” she says, defensive. “It makes a sort of sense, but I don’t know… When you fantasize, like, when you’re alone, do you picture _guys_ then? Like, their _penises_?”

Steve can’t help but choke out a laugh, which he barely manages to smother behind his hand.“ _Nancy_ ,” he hisses. One of Billy’s arms comes up to wrap around his waist, but he seems otherwise undisturbed.

“Well??”

He rolls his eyes, cheeks flushed, and lets a hand trail through the nearest of the copper-tinged curls splayed over his pillows.

“Yeah,” he says. “I fantasize about dicks. And what it feels like to kiss someone with just a little stubble on his jaw. And being fucked in the ass. Is that what you wanna hear?”

He expects her to pull back at that, but Nancy just ploughs ahead.

“But you fantasize about women too?” she doubts.

Steve sighs.

“Yeah, Nance. I still fantasize about women.”

Now it’s Nancy’s turn to sigh. Though what she has to sigh over, Steve is still yet to understand. He shifts against his pillows and glances down to see one sleepy blue eye squinting up at him from the mess of curls at his side.

 _Who?_ Billy mouths silently, frowning.

 _Nancy,_ Steve mouths back.

Billy makes a sour face and pulls Steve’s hand up to check his watch before groaning and burrowing his face into Steve’s side. Steve huffs a ticklish laugh and holds him there.

“Shh,” he whispers.

“Is there someone there with you?” Nancy asks.

Billy, overhearing, pulls his head back just enough to shake it vehemently, but Steve is already answering.

“Just Billy,” he says. “Why, you wanna quiz him about what he jerks off to, too?”

He’s joking, obviously, but the pause Nance leaves before she answers makes Steve’s head spin. Before he can try to end the call or figure out what’s going on with her, though, Billy’s snatching the phone from his loose grip and pulling it up to his own ear.

“Hey Princess, I jerk off to thoughts of your ex-boyfriend and how much you’re missing out on his gorgeous dick. Can we go back to sleep now?”

\\\\\\\\\

Nancy’s breath quickens, though she can’t pinpoint why. The threat of confrontation in Billy’s sleep-gruff voice? The possibility of answers she might not want to find? She doesn’t pause to think on it for long, instead pressing onward.

“What about girls?” she asks. “You can still find girls attractive, right?”

Billy scoffs.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he says. “Not a chance.”

Nancy’s heart skips. Obviously she gets the concept of gayness, the idea of truly not finding one or the other sex appealing, but the idea that girls could just not hold an appeal… Nancy feels slightly dizzy.

“How did you know?” Her voice comes out small. Wobbly.

There’s a long pause before Billy answers. Long enough that she almost worries he’s hung up on her, but she can hear a shifting of sheets on the other end of the line and a whisper too soft for her to catch.

“How’d I know I was gay?” he reiterates.

Nancy nods. “Mhm?”

Billy breathes out slow, clearly thinking, while Nancy holds on to her own breath, not wanting to miss a word.

“I mean, other than the obvious… I guess I just realized that the thought of being in an actual _relationship_ with somebody of the opposite sex sounded like a fucking trap. The idea of a wife and kids and a white picket fence could never have been me. I mean, that kind of settling down still sounds kind of unreal even if I picture it with a guy, but… it’s _different_. You know?”

Nancy nods softly. She realizes her eyes are wet and blinks rapidly, wiping the tears away.

“Yeah,” she croaks. “It is.”

There’s another long silence and Nancy takes a deep, ragged breath, staring blindly at the useless sex-education books she’d obsessively collected earlier that day.

“Billy?” she whispers past the mile-wide lump lodged in her throat.

“Yeah, Princess?” He sounds so awake now, so attentive, that for a manic second her desperate brain tries to quickly cling to that. Make her think she has a crush on him after all, that all of this means nothing, cause she couldn’t possibly be comforted and consoled by a man if she really…

“I think I’m gay.”

The tears can’t be stopped anymore. They flow down her cheeks like the floodgates have been opened, silent but oh-so cathartic.

“The thought of marrying a man makes me sick,” she breathes. “I’ve never been able to— I can’t cum when I think about men, or when I’m with them, but girls… _fuck_.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” Billy’s voice comes through the phone tinny and muffled but comforting nonetheless. “ _Congratulations_ , Wheeler,” he says. “I always thought you were too smart for that hetero crap.”

Nancy chokes out a laugh, muffling it behind her palm to listen in when she hears Steve muffledly exclaiming in the background.

“We should go out to celebrate,” Billy goes on, though. “Stevie’s treat. Huh? All the local queers. You, me, pretty boy, Buckley…”

Nancy’s heart skips a beat at that and she shakes her head quickly.

“Not Robin,” she says.

“Oh?”

“I wanna…” she tangles her fingers in the coily pink phone cord and bites her bottom lip. “I wanna tell her on my own. Not yet.”

“ _Ohh_.”

Nancy’s stomach knots to match the tangled phone cord and she straightens up, frowning.

“Don’t _‘oh’_ like that. I’m still— I have to break up with Jonathan!” Her heart pounds at the thought. “And I don’t want her to think just because… I’m not ‘going gay’ just for her, okay?”

Billy laughs, but there’s no meanness to it. Not like he was before. Being with Steve really has changed him so much. Though it’s changed Steve too, in different ways. The thought of finding a relationship like that for herself with another girl, maybe with _Robin_ , makes Nancy’s cheeks feel warm and her heart feel kind of weightless.

“Okay,” Billy answers. “Take your time, girlie. But we’re still celebrating. After you go the fuck to sleep, cause it’s almost dawn and step one of the Gay Agenda is being well-rested enough to take on the hetero-patriarchy every day. Got that?”

It’s probably a sign of his being right about her needing sleep that Nancy’s hand grabs for a pen when he mentions the Gay Agenda, ready to take copious notes. She heaves a sigh and nods, glancing out her window for the first time in hours, stunned to find that the sky is starting to lighten ever so slightly outside her curtains.

“Okay,” she agrees, shoving her legs out under the covers to carve a space out of the book-filled nightmare that is her bed and curling up inside of it, too tired suddenly to bother properly cleaning up the mess. “And Billy?”

“Yeah, Nance?”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime.”

The last thing Nancy hears before the warmth of a well-earned sleep overtakes her and knocks her out is Billy and Steve’s voices faintly murmuring, their sheets rustling as they cuddle back up together, before one of them clicks their phone back into its cradle. She falls asleep still smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been wanting to write Ronance for months but haven't known where to start at all, and then last night I just wrote this in one go so... maybe this will get a continuation or a sequel? not sure. I'm still so unsure on what the dynamics would be like between Rob and Nance, all I knew was that Nancy doesn't strike me as bisexual at all, but that there was one very relatable way to explain her boy troubles in seasons 1 and 2.


	2. Deliberate Shenanigans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nancy needs to break up with her boyfriend. She also needs to tell Robin about her crush. The two should probably be left to separate conversations, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank y'all for all the buzz around Unexpected Clarity, I probably wouldn't have focused hard enough on figuring out how to follow it up without all that popular demand so thank you! I hope this is a suitable sequel!

Holly’s fingers dance aimlessly over Nancy’s as she struggles to do up her little sister’s seatbelt.

“I can help! Nancy I can help!” she repeats insistently, doing her level best to make Nancy’s job impossible. She’s a sweet kid, but two months of kindergarten seems like it’s made her so much louder. More demanding.

Nancy sighs and gives up, standing back.

“Then do it, Hol,” she says, flinching a second later when Holly actually tries. “Careful of your _fingers_!” she barks, leaning in again to grab her hands back from the mechanism.

Tears well in Holly’s big blue eyes and her bottom lip quivers. Nancy’s stomach sinks. She hasn’t always been this bad with kids, has she? She could’ve sworn there used to be a time Holly trusted her with everything, but lately it feels like she can do no right.

 _Back when you were at least trying to be a real woman,_ a nasty voice sneers in the back of her head, _but what’s it matter? You’re never gonna be a mother now anyway, dyke._

But before Holly can start to cry in earnest, before Nancy can get too deep into her spiral, the opposite door to the back of the station wagon opens and Robin slides in, throwing Nancy a smile. A smile that settles the fear and the guilt in Nancy’s gut and warms her up from the inside out in just a second before sliding over to focus on Holly.

“Hey, glow worm!” The way her voice is automatically a little hushed, just quiet enough that if Holly were to start crying she wouldn’t be able to hear it anymore, seems to calm her down too. “What’s up? Are you putting your seatbelt on?”

Holly nods, eyes glistening.

“That’s so cool. Look, me too!”

Robin carefully and exaggeratedly puts on her seatbelt, then glances over to prompt Holly to mimic her. Holly does, and sure enough, after a little struggling, she gets it to click shut.

“See? Nancy, see? I did it!” Holly’s eyes are still big and wet when they turn to look at her, but she’s grinning from ear to ear.

Nancy can’t help but smile and leans in to kiss her forehead.

“Yeah, you did. Good job, sweetie.”

She glances over at Robin, watching them with a soft smile of her own. _Thank you,_ she mouths silently, and Robin just shakes her head. Nancy doesn’t know how she does it, it’s not like she has any siblings herself, but Robin has been good with Holly from the very first time they met. Hell, Holly’s crush probably rivals her own. Nancy’s cheeks flush at the thought.

It feels strange that Robin should be absent from the front seat, but Holly’s babbling away about her day already, pleased to be joined back there for once, so Nancy settles for meeting Robin’s eyes in the rear-view mirror as she settles behind the wheel of her mom’s car and turns the key in the ignition, chiding herself for her impatient jealousness.

She’s been buzzing with it all day, since she pulled into her usual parking spot at the high school with Robin already there as usual, sneakily stubbing out a barely-smoked menthol cigarette, her couple puffs of the day apparently just finished. Nancy had watched her lips round around the exhale and felt like she was the one getting a high. It’s been hell to keep quiet all day, keep from bursting with the revelations of last night, but a calm-before-the-storm, safe kind of hell. As much as it had been a struggle to try and act normal, to realize how much time spent with Robin “normal” means for her these days, the anticipation of what was coming after school had scared her worse.

But now, as she pulls into the driveway at home, as Robin helps Holly out of the car and chases her indoors, both of them laughing, Nancy has nerves of a different kind. A kind of excitement building in her that she’s almost worried will come off badly when she gets on the phone.

“So, what’s the big secret?” Robin prompts once they’re alone, Holly down the hall watching TV, mom still at work, Mike with Dustin and Max at Lucas’s. She’s sprawled out on the chair in Nancy’s room, one foot dangling over the edge of Nancy’s cluttered desk. “Is it some new Twilight Zone shit? Did Murray get back to you on that stuff we found?” She’s picked up a pen from the desk and is aimlessly playing with it. Nancy’s eyes can’t look away from the deft way her fingers move as she shakes her head no.

“Nothing like that,” she says. “I just, um—” she forces herself to look away, to meet Robin’s eyes. “I need to call Jonathan about something and I, uh…” she clears her throat. “I wanted you to be here.”

Robin frowns, slips one end of the pen between her lips and worries at it, but nods.

“Okay.”

Nancy tries to tell herself that reluctance is a good sign, the very thing that might make all this feel worth it sooner rather than later, but it’s a hard reassurance to hold onto.

Still, she sits down on her bed and pulls the pink rotary phone she’d gotten for her 14th birthday over onto her lap and starts to dial. This is the second call to Jonathan of the week, which means she’ll have to reimburse her parents for the long-distance charge. That’s all she’s thinking of, inexplicably, as the phone rings in her ear. But then, all of a sudden, Jonathan’s voice is there.

_“Hello?”_

Nancy takes a short, steadying breath, and nods.

“Hey Jonathan, it’s me. Can you talk?”

There’s a little pause. Some rustling.

 _“Uh, yeah…”_ Jonathan says, clearly moving to a different room. _“Hold on a second.”_ The second feels like it goes on years. She pictures the house from Jonathan’s photographs, the hallway to his room with its yellowing wallpaper. _“Okay, we’re good. How’s everything? Are you okay?”_

“Yeah!” Nancy’s voice wobbles slightly, and she feels like crap, realizing that calling outside of their schedule probably has him worried. “Everything’s good. Really good,” she insists. “I, um… I figured something out last night. Something I have to tell you.” Across the room, Robin’s fingers still on the pen she’s still messing around with and she throws her an inquisitive glance.

 _“What kind of something?”_ Jonathan asks, as if speaking for both of them. Nancy feels like her heart is going to thud out of her chest. She can’t look across the room at where Robin is still sitting, listening to her side of the conversation, so she stares at her hands instead.

“About myself. And about, um, us, too, I guess. It’s kind of huge, so if you get mad—”

 _“I won’t be mad.”_ Jonathan’s voice goes extra-soft like it always does when normal boys would get louder. Careful. Caring. _“What is it, Nancy?”_ There’s genuine worry in his voice. Nancy shuts her eyes tight and shakes her head.

“No, but if you _do_ get mad, that’s okay. It’s stupid, and I’m— Just don’t hate me okay? I swear I didn’t know about this when we started dating. I didn’t—” She stops herself before she talks herself off a cliff, and takes a deep, shaky breath.

_“Nance, you’re gonna give me a heart-attack. What is it?”_

For a second, Nancy almost loses her nerve. Her heart is pounding so hard it feels like it’s going to come out her mouth, and she brings a shaky hand up to cover it preemptively. But the moment passes. She has to do this. Now or never. She tightens her jaw and—

“I’m a lesbian.”

Robin’s leg slips off the desk with a thud, and when Nancy glances up to meet her eyes they’ve gone wide and unreadable. Jonathan is quiet on the other end of the line. Nancy worries her bottom lip and glances away, breathing slow.

“Jonathan? You still there?” she asks.

The line crackles.

 _“Yeah, I’m still— I’m still here.”_ His voice is softer than ever.

Nancy nods.

“I’m sorry. I really _do_ like you. I wish— I’d never want to hurt you. That’s why— you deserve to be with someone who can love you the way you deserve. You know? I just— That can’t be me. I’m so sorry.”

Jonathan clears his throat roughly, but it still cracks when he speaks again.

 _“It’s okay,”_ he says. _“Don’t— don’t be sorry.”_

Nancy nods again, bringing her legs up to sit cross-wise on the bed. She chances another glance across the room and is surprised to see Robin hugging her own legs to her chest, biting her nails like it’s her that’s coming out all over again. She sends Nancy a watery grin and a thumbs up when she catches her looking, and Nancy has to suppress a laugh.

Luckily, Jonathan doesn’t seem to catch that.

 _“If it’s what you are, it’s what you are,”_ he’s saying firmly. _“I tell Will the same thing all the time. ‘s not your fault.”_

And _fuck_. Nancy can’t say she wasn’t hoping he’d say something kind of like that, at least eventually, but she hadn’t considered how that kind of thing would feel coming from him _at all_. Suddenly her bottom lip is trembling just like Holly’s had earlier, and there are tears blurring her vision, and she has to cover her mouth and gasp for breath because _yeah_ , she needed to hear that for sure.

Robin drops her legs back to the floor with a dark look, probably thinking the worst, and lunges across the room to come sit next to her on the frilly pink comforter she’s poked so much fun at over the past few months.

“You okay?” she whispers, looking Nancy carefully in the eye, and Nancy nods but leans against her gratefully when she offers her shoulder.

_“Nancy?”_

Nancy clears her throat and nods again, stupidly.

“Yeah! I’m here. I’m just— a mess. Thank you. Fuck, how’re you such a good boyfriend even right now?” Her laugh comes out sounding a little crazy, but that’s just because it _feels_ crazy. To say those words, to be leaned up against Robin’s shoulder, her arm wrapped firmly around Nancy’s back, holding her together. Jonathan chokes out a kind of crazy laugh too, one Nancy can almost hear the smile in. It makes her heart clench painfully.

 _“I’m just really fucking cool like that, I guess,”_ he jokes. Nancy laughs, even though something about it seems so sad. _“But really. Don’t worry about me, Nance, just go get your girl. Hold Robin’s hand or whatever. I’m— I’ll be okay.”_

Nancy’s heart stutters at that, and she pulls back, sitting up stock still suddenly.

“I— I never said Robin was—”

Robin’s eyebrows shoot up, and Nancy’s pulse races as she fights the urge to look anywhere but at her. This is it. This is why she’d wanted her here in the first place. She can’t back out now.

 _“Shit, sorry,”_ Jonathan’s apologizing, _“I just thought— you’ve been talking about her a lot lately so…”_

Nancy’s stomach swoops at the idea that she’s been so obvious to everyone but herself, but even more at the intensity with which Robin is watching her now.

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, she’s been a good friend, you know? And I… I don’t really know if I have a type, but if I do, she’s exactly it, I think. She’s smart, and funny, and— I mean, she’s _hot_... but we— we’re just friends.”

Jonathan probably responds, but Nancy’s heart is pounding too loud for her to hear him. Robin’s cheeks have gone bright red, but that’s nothing to the color she’s biting into her bottom lip. Nancy wants to taste that color so bad she’s buzzing with it.

“Anyway, I should probably go,” Nancy says, leaning back towards her night-stand with the phone. “I’ll talk to you later, ‘kay? Love you, bye!”

The way she hangs up, the phone catching for a moment on the rests before it hits the hook and ends the call, is probably a bit too eager. She maybe shouldn’t have ended with ‘love you’ either. But she couldn’t care less. Robin is glancing over at her through her lashes — _down_ at her, from where Nancy’s leaned back on one arm to hang up the phone — breathing almost as shaky as Nancy herself.

She lets go of her bottom lip and smiles nervously, raising an eyebrow.

“ _So…_ ” Robin’s eyes widen a little, her surprise and disbelief and whatever else Nancy _hopes_ is in there coming out in that one word.

Nancy nods, sitting slowly back up until they’re knee to knee.

“So…” she huffs out on a deep sigh.

Robin glances around the quiet room, black nails fidgeting with a rip in the knee of her light-wash jeans, and glances back up at Nancy slowly, cautiously.

The air between them has been charged like this more and more often recently, but never quite like this. Like the air is getting more and more electric, just by their existing next to each other. Robin huffs out a breath, cheeks going impossibly redder.

“Can I—” she starts, but from the way she leans just a little, tilts her head, talks low, Nancy doesn’t have to let her finish.

Instead she just says, “ _Please_ ,” and then they’re both leaning in, pulled toward each other, easy as falling.

Robin’s lips brush hers, soft and cautious and gentle, and Nancy feels like the butterflies in her stomach are rioting. Robin moves her lips like no boy Nancy’s ever kissed, and when her hands fall to the tops of Nancy’s knees it sends shocks all the way to her core.

She kisses back like she’s been in the dark all her life and Robin is the sun: desperate, searching. And after a moment, and a smiling, breathless, “Jesus, Nance,” Robin kisses her back in kind.

In seconds she’s pushed onto her back, Robin’s weight pressing down on top of her, chest to chest as Robin’s tongue finds hers, and Nancy’s never felt so turned on in her life, just by something so simple. She brings a hand up to hold Robin close by the back of her neck, and her fingers catch on the gaudy pearl necklace Robin had jokingly swiped from her vanity that first time she’d come into Nancy’s room, the one Nancy had insisted she keep because it suited her better, that Robin has worn almost constantly since.

Her breath catches and she grins, pulling Robin back in for another searing kiss.

“Yeah,” she sighs, when they finally break apart again, her lips tingling and her heartbeat going crazy, “definitely a lesbian.”

Robin makes a face and pins her down a bit harder.

“I’d fuckin’ _hope_ so,” she says, shaking her head in wonder. “You just broke Byers’s poor heart over long-distance as a _pickup line_!”

Nancy feels a tug of guilt over that, but it’s quickly drowned out when Robin laughs against her lips and pulls them back together again. She’ll make it up to him somehow. Later.

For now, she wraps her arms around Robin’s waist and sighs into another kiss.


End file.
